Модальность достоверности как модусная категория коммуникативного уровня (на материале английского языка)

Abstract

The aim of the study is to clarify the communicative specificity of certainty as a particular modus meaning of the category of modality on the material of the English language. With the development of linguistic thought and the accumulation of theoretical information about modality, the ideas about its categorical belonging have undergone significant changes. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the approach to the modality of certainty as a particular modus meaning within the category of modality on the communicative level. Modality is attributed to different types of categories, such as grammatical or syntactical and semantic or functional-semantic ones, to the conceptual category. During last decades, the idea about necessity of assigning modality to the communicative category has been sounding more and more persistently. In this article, we present the analysis of modern researchers’ views on the communicative category and the modality of certainty. The received results allow considering the modality of certainty within the limits of the modus category of modality of the communicative level. The modality of certainty serves to subjectively qualify a message in terms of assessing the extent to which it corresponds to objective reality in the interests of the speaker. This conclusion was illustrated in the article by examples from English-language fiction texts.